[re-post from april 2014 (and updated), because the college rape crisis and my recent semester at the family court dealing with protection orders make a revisit apposite.]
Recently an old classmate from graduate school wrote a moving post on the eve of her being called to the New York bar: coincidentally it is the death anniversary of her close friend, who was killed by a dating partner when they were both students at Columbia. (That would, I now realise, have been a decade before Emma Sulkowicz.) My classmate now joins the NY District Attorney’s office, prosecuting sexual violence.Violence — of any kind - is very far from my mind in Singapore. NUS sent us a campus safety survey last month and I couldn’t rate any of their services from 1-5: I didn’t know what services they had. American colleges on the other hand are constantly reminding students to travel in pairs or to request campus escort services when walking home late at night, to know where the nearest emergency “blue phones” are. (I don’t know if NUS has escort services, who knows, maybe we do, but the point is I don’t feel I need to find out, and I don’t care if we don’t.) I remember the impatience and incomprehension I felt soon after I’d moved to the US, when one night I had wanted to answer an emergency call for Chinese interpreters at the UVA hospital (it was just gone 9pm) and my roommate (American) was scandalised and insisted on calling escort services for me (She got her way, but I walked home afterwards.) At the end of a group evening in Charlottesville or Cambridge — cities I thought of as safe cities — if no one else was heading for the same dormitory, a male friend would usually detach himself from the party and insist on walking home with me. It took some years for me to appreciate that this is simply and habitually understood as a fundamental part of American campus safety culture. (“Friends don’t let friends walk home alone,” was one of the university safety slogans in those days.)
But back then this abundance of caution always felt unreal to me, as if my compliance was a kind of playacting to placate the sensitivities of the paranoid. I grew up after all in a country where we are heavily accustomed to taking public safety for granted. In Singapore friends wouldn’t blink twice about your going home alone in the wee hours, and I don’t expect them to either. In fact, in the US when a male friend did not walk me home late at night, it was invariably because I’d been out with a group of Singaporeans. Years later, living in Singapore again, I felt a twinge of annoyance leaving the apartment of a boyfriend, because he had not come downstairs with me to get a cab. It is, I thought, two in the morning, did he not care about my safety, because it was a nuisance his having to put on clothes again? And then of course, a moment later I laughed to myself — how American I’ve become in my expectations! But this is Singapore, he and I know nothing will happen, why should I begrudge him anything? (Not that this isn’t a strange inverted sexism too: expecting to be accompanied. I was thinking about this last month, when someone declined my offer to be on a legal awareness project because there may be “violence” involved. They don’t want the responsibility of having failed to protect me if someone attacked me. Do I say, don’t assume that as a woman I’m inherently vulnerable to physical and sexual violence and would be a liability to your team! But on the other hand, that is exactly what an American university assumes about me when I try to go home alone. And that is also, in most places and for most women, exactly true.)
Then again this sense of safety from sexual violence I feel so assured of in Singapore is framed only in terms of public safety: of course no one jumped out at you from behind bushes — what happens here is what happens elsewhere: violence from dating partners. Et in Arcadia. Two summers ago I was manning a general information counter in the State Court. In just ten mornings I saw 3 victims of partner violence: women with bruised faces, swollen eyes, marks on their necks, even hearing loss (I thought of the Wyf of Bath and her Janson immediately). If these are just the people who decide to come forward, and only the ones who happen to come during my short shift, how many are there over the entire year, over the whole population?
I frame the question in terms of “dating partners” because this is the specific problem in our law: in Singapore you cannot get a personal protection order against your abusive boyfriend or even a live-in partner: only against a spouse. So you must file a criminal complaint against him. Now sometimes, in assault, abuse or harassment cases, if the parties are dating partners the magistrate will order mandatory mediation instead of initiating prosecution. If there is a pre-existing intimate relationship, we say, it is much better we try and remedy the situation with “soft methods”. And the state pays for the mediation and counselling, which is, on the whole, probably a far better use of taxpayers’ money than full-blown legal proceedings. I think that is the sensible thing to do — in many cases.
But sometimes, I wonder if in some cases we have sent victims back home with insufficient safeguards against their continued abuse. And I’ve observed that even if a woman owns the home outright and the abusive live-in partner is there on bare licence, she often does not dare to evict. Once, listening to someone tell her story, I found myself wanting to say: It’s your house and he’s been hurting you, the fact that you came to us means you’re frightened and desperate. Do you want to wait till he hurts you very badly? Put his things outside, change your locks, go stay with a friend for a few days. But I bite my tongue. If an abusive person is incensed by eviction, what is to stop him from lying in wait for her outside the house and hurting her even more badly? What right have I to blithely advise her to open defiance if it leads her to greater danger, if I cannot concurrently guarantee her safety? Because when I ask her to stand on her rights, I assume she has the personal (including financial) resources to assert those rights. She may not. She most probably does not. Women from low-income households are at disproportionate risk of domestic and sexual violence: even when they have the courage to act and have been given information about what to do, we may not have made it financially viable for them to vindicate those rights and to obtain the protection they need.
So each time I go back to the question of why dating violence feels so remote for me personally. I don’t want the answer simply to come down to economic class in the end. (At first I also said, perhaps I am in a better position to trust that the type of men I date will not inflict violence on me? For isn’t the fact that we are even able to simulate violence as part of sexual play a measure of how secure we feel — because otherwise how can we casually reenact something that would be so degrading for someone else? But that would be even more patronising, if I let myself believe that, and completely unfair. Because everyone trusts a dating partner right up till the point they can’t. And given what we know about gender violence on college campuses today, given what we know about UVA, Amherst, Columbia, Harvard… education and socio-economic class has little to do with what is at the heart of the problem.) But if economic class has something to do with it, then it is this: if it ever happens to me one day however degrading or traumatic it will be I know I will still be capable of some things. I can afford to seek medical attention for my injuries and professional psychological support for my emotional recovery. I am capable of making a police report and initiating legal proceedings, to seek redress for what has been done and to protect myself from repeat assault. I can do this not just because I will not be cowering under stigma real or imagined, but also because I have the knowhow and the professional connections and the financial resources to see a doctor, get a therapist, hire a lawyer, even contact the media. Have we made it financially and socially, not just legally possible for them to access the same resources I have outlined for myself? That is something worth finding out.
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